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I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.

Vijay Prashad

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Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Place
Take
Uprisings
Important
Uprising
Spontaneity
Politically
Preparation
Combination
Understand

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

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All evidence suggests that Turkey has allowed ISIS fighters, when they've been injured, to return into Turkey and to get treated in Turkey's hospitals.
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Where there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.
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There's a different use for different strategies.
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Interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you've actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don't necessarily see red flags everywhere.
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Interestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them... They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.
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There's no UN resolution that allows the United States to carry out operations in Syria. You'll remember that in Libya in 2011 there was a great hoopla made about the importance of getting a UN resolution. Here there was no attempt to get any resolution. They simply bombed in Syria.
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The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.
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There are people who are saying that they voted twice for Mr. Obama and they are now feeling a great sense of regret, not only over Guantanamo, etc., but now perhaps the entry into a new war in West Asia.
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Leadership is another word for preparation.
Vijay Prashad
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People were, in good faith perhaps, writing history books about the Indian working class, Indian peasantry, et cetera, and at no point did Communists make an entry, not even to be criticized. They were essentially being whitewashed from history.
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It's plain that the American right wing, the Republicans and some sections of the Democratic Party, don't really care about international norms. They believe in the executive authority of the president. They don't even believe the United Nations or international law should play any role vis-à-vis American policymaking.
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It's Israelis who are ready to abandon the hard work of peace.
Vijay Prashad
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To be a Communist or to be somebody who believes in the future is a curious thing. So you have to live with people around you, you have to be with the people.
Vijay Prashad
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Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.
Vijay Prashad
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However you define territorial ambitions, it need not be a country that's right next to the U.S. for it to exercise its extraterritorial or territorial ambitions.
Vijay Prashad
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You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
Vijay Prashad
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Over the last two or so decades, there's been an increase in thinking among the Left, liberals, intellectuals in the direction of so-called spontaneity. In other words that uprisings happen spontaneously, people are frustrated, angry, then they spontaneously rise up. And what they don't require is preparation, or what we used to call leadership.
Vijay Prashad
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We would like to participate in manifestations, in Occupies and things like that. We would like to be involved in a march. But we don't actually see the very hard work that goes to build confidence towards those events. And we don't have a shared discussion.
Vijay Prashad
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Mr. Obama at the UN said that the large nations should not trample small ones in pursuit of what he called territorial ambition. These are curious statements coming from the American president at this time.
Vijay Prashad
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From 1991 till the present, Iraq sovereignty has been trampled by the United States.
Vijay Prashad